The United Nations says the drug war’s rationale is to build “a drug-free world — we can do it!” U.S. government officials agree, stressing that “there is no such thing as recreational drug use.” So this isn’t a war to stop addiction, like that in my family, or teenage drug use. It is a war to stop drug use among all humans, everywhere. All these prohibited chemicals need to be rounded up and removed from the earth. That is what we are fighting for.

I began to see this goal differently after I learned the story of the drunk elephants, the stoned water buffalo, and the grieving mongoose. They were all taught to me by a remarkable scientist in Los Angeles named Professor Ronald K.

Amazingly enough the powerful hallucinogen ketamine (the horse tranquilizer sometimes known as Special K) is being touted as a serious and better alternative to the SSRIs like Prozac. Report from the New York Times:

It is either the most exciting new treatment for depression in years or it is a hallucinogenic club drug that is wrongly being dispensed to desperate patients in a growing number of clinics around the country.

It is called ketamine — or Special K, in street parlance.

While it has been used as an anesthetic for decades, small studies at prestigious medical centers like Yale, Mount Sinai and the National Institute of Mental Health suggest it can relieve depression in many people who are not helped by widely used conventional antidepressants like Prozac or Lexapro.

And the depression seems to melt away within hours, rather than the weeks typically required for a conventional antidepressant.

If all you know about LSD (full name: lysergic acid diethylamide) comes from that 1972 cult classic, you’re still armed to the teeth with anecdotal knowledge about hallucinogens. But here at Substance.com, we decided to take a deep dive into the history of hallucinogens on a bet that the psychedelic ’60s were the least of it. We were not disappointed. Here are 10 of our mind-bending finds:

1. The ancients were familiar with hallucinogensand even had special paraphernalia for their use. In 2008, two archeologists made a “breakthrough” discovery when they uncovered equipment used for sniffing hallucinogenic chemicals.… Read the rest

Humans have been ingesting mind-altering substances for a very long time. Hallucinogen-huffing bowls 2,500 years old have been found on islands in the Lesser Antilles, and traditional cultures from the Americas to Africa use hallucinogenic substances for spiritual purposes. Here are some notable substances that send the mind tripping.

8. LSD

LSD is commonly known as “acid,” but its scientific name is a mouthful: lysergic acid diethylamaide. The drug was first synthesized in 1938 from a chemical called ergotamine. Ergotamine, in turn, is produced by a grain fungus that grow on rye.

LSD was originally produced by a pharmaceutical company under the name Delysid, but it got a bad reputation in the 1950s when the CIA decided to research its effects on mind control. The test subjects of the CIA project MKULTRA proved very difficult to control indeed, and many, like counter-culture writer Ken Kesey, started taking the drug for fun(and for their own form of 1960s enlightenment).

The daughter of one of the country’s leading clinical researchers of psychedelic-assisted therapy visits Amsterdam.

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Drugs were a big part of my upbringing in Southern California, but not in the usual way. My dad, Charles Grob, is the director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center; he’s also one of the country’s leading clinical researchers of psychedelic-assisted therapy.

From 1993 to 1995, while I was in elementary school, he studied the physiological effects of the drug MDMA. In 1993 and then in 2001, when I was in ninth grade, he went to Brazil to study the use of ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea. From 2004 to 2008, while I was in college, he studied the effects of psilocybin as a therapeutic aid in treating end-stage cancer anxiety.

My dad’s research library is crammed with first-person hallucinogenic accounts, and I’ve read them all.

Suppose Christians took a closer look at what their holy book is truly discussing? NeuroBrainstorm looks at a wide range of biblically-key plants with mind-altering properties:

Holy Anointing Oil – (Leviticus 10:6) Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment. (Exodus 29:7) Then shalt thou take the anointing oil, and pour it upon his head and anoint him.

The holy anointing oil is a potent psychedelic extract…essentially an anxiolytic-hallucinogen. The transdermal application of it led to its absorption and psychoactive effects, even in extremely low doses. The bible suggests anointing with a large amount of oil possibly to ensure a psychedelic response.

Manna – (Exodus 16 14, 31) Behold…there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground. And the house of Israel called the name thereof Manna: and it was like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.

Three young people were arrested and hospitalized, one with injuries, Sunday morning in the wake of what officials described as “a Mill Valley LSD party gone bad.”

Southern Marin Fire paramedics responded around 7:30 a.m. to a 911 call reporting a 16-year-old boy having a seizure at a residence in the 100 block of Reed Boulevard, said Marin County sheriff’s Lt. Doug Pittman.

When the paramedics tried to get in, another 16-year-old boy at the entry gate covered with blood attacked them with what they later described as “superhuman strength,” refusing to let them in, Pittman said. Marin County sheriff’s deputies arrived within minutes to help, Pittman said.

The deputies were confronted by other partygoers, including a combative young girl, and called for backup.

“There were no significant associations between lifetime use of any psychedelics, or use of LSD in the past year, and increased rate of any of the mental health outcomes,” Pål-Ørjan Johansen and Teri Krebs from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim concluded in their study published in the PLOS One journal on Tuesday.

“Rather, in several cases psychedelic use was associated with a lower rate of mental health problems.”

For the study, the researchers analyzed data on the more than 130,000 Americans who took drug use surveys between 2001 and 2004, of which 22,000 had used a psychedelic drug at least once.

“Despite popular perceptions, expert harm assessments have not demonstrated that classical serotonergic psychedelic substances such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline are demonstrated to cause chronic mental health problems,” Johansen told The Local.